London Labour and the London Poor - Volume 1 by Henry Mayhew (1812 - 1887).

Subtitled, "A Cyclopaedia of the condition and earnings of those that will work, those that cannot work, and those that will not work."

"The history of a people from the lips of the people themselves .. their labour, earnings, trials and sufferings, in their own unvarnished language, and to pourtray the condition of their homes and their families by personal observation of the places ..." "My earnest hope is that the book may serve to give the rich a more intimate knowledge of the sufferings, and the frequent heroism under those sufferings, of the poor ..."

Henry Mayhew was a social researcher and journalist; he compiled a four volume work in minute detail on the lives of the poor in London, of which this is the first volume, published in 1851.

Notes:
1 The reader has attempted different voices to separate the interviewees from the narrator, but makes no claim to the accents being appropriate to the speakers.
2 Very occasionally, the language used may be uncomfortable to a modern listener.
3 Sections 34 and 52 consist of analyses of the data collected in the preceding sections. Mayhew himself implies that it might not be too interesting for some of his readers. Listeners to this recording could miss out these sections without fear that they are missing too much.
4 Where expletives and proper names have been abbreviated in the text as, for example, "D---d", or "Mrs M---", these have been read as "D blank D" and "Mrs M blank".
5 There are some pages of errata at the end of the book, which mainly involve corrections to the many numbers given in the text. The corrections have been included in the recording. However, many arithmetical errors still exist; these have been left unchanged.
6 "ing-uns" are frequently mentioned as being sold by the costermongers. This is clarified on page 94 of the text as being their name for onions.
7 The phrase "Han-sellers" in section 55 is clarified as "hand-sellers" in a later section.
8 A quartern loaf weighs four pounds.
9 A "pottle" is a volume of half a gallon (four pints).
10 "Tin" is a nickname for money in general, while a "brown" seems to be the nickname for a copper/bronze coin (a farthing, half-penny, penny, etc.).
11 "Women (or girls) of the town" is a euphemism for prostitutes.

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The reader will record the following at the beginning and end of each file:
No more than 0.5 to 1 second of silence at the beginning of the recording!START of recording (Intro):

"Section [number] of London Labour and the London Poor, by Henry Mayhew - Volume 1. This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information, or to volunteer, please visit: librivox DOT org"

This is an enormous project; I estimate about 47 hours of recording. There is a short book on archive.org that extracts interesting bits from the first three volumes of Mayhew's series (it's called "Mayhew's London"), but unfortunately it was compiled quite recently.

Peter

"Anyone who believes that exponential growth can go on forever in a finite world is either a madman or an economist." Kenneth Boulding, 1973

I was puzzled as to exactly what "viz" meant, so I checked (it means "namely"). After doing that, I thought that I'd try to stick to a specific definition for it and other Latin abbreviations. I can't remember where I got "and so on" as a definition for "&c" ... when I looked it up just now, you're right that it's equivalent to "etc". But Mayhew uses both "etc" and "&c", so I decided that I would carry on handling them slightly differently. ... it's either that, or go back through the file that's uploading now!

EDIT: Section 1 uploaded.

Peter

Last edited by Peter Why on August 17th, 2018, 8:05 am, edited 2 times in total.

"Anyone who believes that exponential growth can go on forever in a finite world is either a madman or an economist." Kenneth Boulding, 1973